Education, in the modern view, is largely responsible for discontent, and should be restricted. Judge Simeon A. Baldwin, of the Connecticut Supreme Court, and lecturer in the Yale Law School, is quite certain upon this point. His “signed editorial,” in the April 9th issue of a New York newspaper published by the Yale lecturer on journalism, expresses a view which is coming to be widely held. Our young men, he notes with great complacency, are obliged to leave school early, in order to go to work; and he thereupon urges that young women also should clip their education at an early age. “Girls would make better wives and mothers and housekeepers,” he writes, “if they finished school at from fourteen to sixteen years of age. As it is, they obtain a smattering of many studies, which in my opinion cannot do them much good. They are possessed by a spirit of unrest to-day, and develop ambitions not compatible with the happiest homes.”
Professor Harry Thurston Peck expresses the modern view more succinctly. Professor Peck, it may be stated for the benefit of the unenlightened, is an instructor of Latin in Columbia University. No pent-up Utica, however, contracts his powers; he has courageously sallied forth from his particular domain and has taken all knowledge for his province. Over this province he ranges with unconstrained freedom, noting what he will, and, with something of the “large utterance of the early gods,” making known to a waiting world his impressions and beliefs. What a great lexicographer said of an amiable poet may be repeated in present praise: He touches nothing that he does not adorn. Some intellectual limitations it is possible he may have; but as a reflector of certain current views obtaining in high places he is probably without a peer. In his article, “Some Phases of American Education,” in the Cosmopolitan magazine a few years ago, he put the matter in this way:—
“Linked closely with many other very serious educational mistakes, and from many points of view by far the most profoundly serious of them all, is that curious fancy, which is almost universal among our people, that education in itself and for all human beings is a good and thoroughly desirable possession.... There is probably in our whole system to-day no principle so fundamentally untrue as this, and there is certainly none that is fraught with so much social and political peril for the future. For education means ambition, and ambition means discontent.”
But, as Shakespeare’s Fluellen remarks, “the phrase is a little variations.” All discontent is not the same, and that which stirs in the bosom of Professor Peck must be carefully discriminated from the sort nurtured by plain John Smith. “Nothing so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy,” sang Sir John Fletcher; but what is meet for an Elizabethan poet or a present-day philosopher may be most unmeet for a common plebeian. “Now discontent,” continues this pharos of the unenlightened, “is in itself a divine thing. When it springs up in a strong, creative intellect, capable of translating it into actual achievement, it is the mother of all progress; but when it germinates in a limited and feeble brain, it is the mother of unhappiness alone.”
Dr. Arthur Twining Hadley, president of Yale University, also has doubts. His recent book, “The Education of the American Citizen,” might be supposed, from its title, to be a plea for the popular diffusion of knowledge. Such it is, in fact, only the author draws the line at “sociology and politics and civics and finance.” “When the plea is urged, as it so often is,” he writes, “that they constitute a necessary and valuable training for citizenship, we are justified in making a distinct protest. Except within the narrowest limits, they do harm rather than good. As ordinarily taught, ... they tend to prepare the minds of the next generation to look to superficial remedies for political evils, instead of seeing that the only true remedy lies in the creation of a sound public sentiment.”
The term, “superficial remedies for political evils,” means, in plain words, social legislation; and it brings up a second matter upon which our moulders of opinion have made a considerable approach to unanimity. We hear legislation flouted on all sides, and appeals made for individual regeneration. The matter-of-fact persons who hold that sixty years of factory acts have had more to do with establishing humane conditions in certain quarters of the planet than nineteen hundred years of hortatory appeals to the individual man, are dismissed with a smile of contempt; and the declaration is made that most legislation is mischievous, and that nothing but character counts. Mr. Godkin was “far from denying that legislation and political changes have been the direct means of great good,” though he held that “every good change in legislation or in government has been preceded or brought about by an increase of intelligence, of reasonableness, or of brotherly kindness on the part of the people at large.” A conclusion, to say the least, not overfreighted with historical learning, since many and perhaps most reformatory laws have been passed by an earnest minority against the active opposition of many, and despite the stolid passivity of most, and what mankind has heretofore called social progress has been largely due to the reaction of such laws and like institutions upon individual character.
President Hadley differs somewhat from Mr. Godkin. Too much stress, he believes, is laid upon the mechanism of government and of industry, and too little upon the force by which this mechanism is kept at work.
“Not by the axioms of metaphysics on the one hand, nor by the machinery of legislation on the other,” he writes, “can we deal with the questions which vex human society.... Conscious of its honesty of purpose, it [democracy] is impatient of opposition, and contemptuous of difficulties, however real. It undertakes a vast amount of regulation of economic and social life in fields where two generations ago a free government would scarce have dared to enter. In these new regulations there are many instances of failure, and relatively few of success. We have had much infringement of personal liberty, with little or no corresponding benefit to the community.”
In Justice Brewer’s recent volume of Yale lectures, also, there is much regard for character, and much even for associated work in bettering the life of the nation. But as to legislation as a means of achieving this betterment, there is a cautious silence. There is the declaration that each man in free America is a ruler—glad tidings to the persons ignorant thereof. There are some original lines,—